Christopher Nolan Returning to his Howard Hughes Biopic?

The 'Dark Knight' director will stretch his creative muscles by directing a film about a secretive billionaire industrialist. Oh wait...

We love talking about Christopher Nolan. How many other A-List directors have never made a bad film? So we’re not even remarking with scrutiny when he says he wants to do another biographical account of Howard Hughes when Martin Scorsese already did an amazing job with The Aviator. Nolan previously scrapped his own planned project when Scorsese beat him to the punch with his own multiple-Academy Award winner. The Vulture has been ‘told’ – by whom, exactly, they’re being suspiciously coy about – that Nolan’s film wouldn’t be ready for release until 2014, a full ten years after The Aviator‘s release, which would hopefully be a large enough buffer to shield his film from comparisons to the last Howard Hughes film.

Unlike The Aviator, which told the story of Howard Hughes right up until his famed reclusive period, Nolan’s version is expected to focus almost entirely on what many would simply refer to as ‘the crazy years.’ Among the incidents covered in the film’s source material, Michael Drosnin’s book Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness, include the time Hughes purchased every single franchise chain in his home state of Texas (he was worried about food safety), an incident in which he had an enormous airplane filtration system installed into his car (he was worried about air safety), and how, at the end of his life, he only let Mormons into his inner circle (he was worried about trustworthiness safety).

Here’s hoping that Nolan’s followup to The Dark Knight Rises finally gives him the clout and pedigree to actually pick up a Best Director Oscar. A historical piece should do the trick (it worked for Spielberg, after all), and with Nolan’s notable tendency to work with the same actors over and over again he could probably get someone like Leonardo DiCaprio to play Howard Hughes, which ought to lend him the star power needed to overcome all those inevitable comparisons to The Avia…

Oh right. CraveOnline will be back with more news on this rumor as it is confirmed, debunked, or starts wearing tissue boxes on its feet.